Israeli health experts inspect PH vax hubs, inoculation plan

MANILA – The delegation of health experts from Israel will assess the country’s coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) inoculation plan by visiting various vaccination hubs and cold chain storage facilities to help the Philippine government improve its pandemic response strategies.

On Wednesday, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) led by Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque, National Task Force (NTF) Against Covid-19 chief implementer Carlito Galvez Jr., testing czar Vince Dizon along with Parañaque Mayor Edwin Olivarez joined the Israeli health experts in inspecting a vaccination hub set up at the Solaire Theatre in Parañaque City.

The delegation from the Israeli Ministry of Health composed of Avraham Ben Zaken, deputy director-general of the Ichilov Medical Center; Dafna Segol, consultant of Healthcare Policy and Innovation; and Adam Segal, logistics and operations manager of Salomon Levid & Elstein Ltd. will also visit the Lakeshore mega vaccination hub in Taguig City on Thursday.

Galvez, also the country’s vaccine czar, said the Israeli experts will help the government further develop more improved strategies on data management, deployment methods, transition to the new normal, and addressing vaccine hesitancy.

“It is our hope that through our discussions in the coming days, we would be able to learn from the Israeli experience and apply these lessons in our battle against the pandemic, particularly on how we can further improve our information and data management and vaccine deployment strategies,” he said.

The Israeli team has so far shared key strategies to effectively contain virus transmission and reduce active cases within communities.

Meanwhile, Roque emphasized that the country has to learn the containment strategies done by the Israeli government to achieve mass population protection.

“We need to learn from Israel kasi (because) Israel successfully achieved containment and we want to learn from what they did to achieved containment,” he said.

Roque said the Solaire vaccination hub, which can accommodate at least 6,000 vaccinees daily, will cater to the employees of various private companies.

The private sector has entered a tripartite agreement with the national government and pharmaceutical companies to purchase their own Covid-19 vaccines.